About the piece
The Last Battle of King Sorrow is a piece of both melancholy and bravura. The main horn theme brings to my mind a king near the end of his reign who reflects on old triumphs and failures. As a whole, the piece creates a tapestry of memories as every theme in the first movement is revisited in the following three movements. The unusual instrumentation (a standard woodwind quintet joined by a bass clarinet) is inspired by Leoš Janáček’s masterpiece Mladi, in which he uses the bass clarinet as the main bass instrument, freeing the bassoon to marvel at its lyrical tenor register. In King Sorrow, I chose to celebrate the existence of two bass instruments through nods to rock bands that cherish a dark tone. Throughout the first movement, the bassoon and bass clarinet play a heavy bass line using power chords, a guitar technique that is popular in hard rock. The second movement features a repeated section that is my attempt to re-create a grand, Alice-in-Chains-esque chorus: the upper woodwinds growl in close 3-part harmony that resembles this band’s distinctive vocal harmonies, the bass instruments share bass duties through Bach-like imitation, and the French horn bends notes up and down, suggesting an electric guitar played with a whammy bar and a wah-wah effect. In the third and fourth movements, several melodies and bass lines are immediately echoed by another instrument similarly to Pink Floyd’s use of delay effect. Lastly, King Sorrow owes some debt to his brother-in-arms King Crimson. This genre-bending band combines rock grooves with some of the most dissonant licks in rock history, to the point of mingling with the dark art of atonality (heavens!). Due to the mark that these musicians and others have on The Last Battle of King Sorrow, I included in the score a list of musical references. I hope these could be useful for performers for capturing particular sounds and performance styles, or at least provide them with an uncanny playlist for eerie nights.
The Last Battle of King Sorrow
For flute, oboe, clarinet in Bb, French horn, bassoon, and bass clarinet (2022)
Length: 20 minutes
This performance (rehearsal before the piece’s premiere at Carnegie Hall):
Catherine Gregory, flute
Stuart Breczinski, oboe
Moran Katz, clarinet
Laura Weiner, horn
Brad Balliett, bassoon
Ben Baron, bass clarinet
